Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Everyone would gather
On the twenty-fourth of May
Sitting in the sand
To watch the fireworks display...

...says Rush's song Lakeside Park. Here in Puerto Rico we have to wait for another country's independence celebration to watch a fireworks display. This year I was looking forward for the fourth of July's fireworks to finally practice some techniques to photograph...well, fireworks.

Now that I have acquired what is needed to shoot pictures in low light, I have been reading many articles and websites that say getting good shots of fireworks is not that hard. You need some basic equipment to achieve decent pictures: a camera (of course) with a wide angle lens, a tripod and a remote shutter release. Once you have that, you play around with the settings and the only thing you are missing are the fireworks.

I have bought most of my photography equipment from Adorama.com. They have a series of how-to-videos made by @jmarkwallace that are great to learn different techniques. Last week he tweeted 8 tips for mastering firework photography. Today I applied them with my camera and here are the results. These shots were taken from Parque de la Laguna del Condado facing the lagoon and the Dos Hermanos bridge that connects San Juan with the Condado area.

This was my first time shooting fireworks and my window of opportunity wasn't that big since the show lasted less than 10 minutes. I used my Canon Rebel XTi on BULB mode, f/10 - f/14, mounted on a tripod and released the shutter remotely, I used two of my lenses .